I have been reading up a storm in the last few months. I used to write up the books like I try to with albums, but I just don't have the heart for it, and to be honest, I can't remember the last book I reviewed/first book left unreviewed. I can just take a guess and see what I remember from the reading. I will try not to get into overkill here, but with some it is unavoidable. I will try splitting this entry into pieces to make it more digestable. Just make sure you chew it all good before ya swallow...

Irene Nemirovsky - Suite Francaise: Easily the best bit of fiction I have read in recent memory. It is historical fiction to be sure, but tying the story to real events is hardly a guarantee a book will be illuminating to any degree. This story literally had my stomach in knots to read, especially since the post-script makes the leap into the realm of non-fiction, yet remains 100% relevant to the story. I can't say enough good things about this book other than to say it is tough saying anything good about something so lump-in-the-throat horrific. If you like WWII history, European history, and the like, but read very little fiction, this should be on your reading list. As only the best work does, this is something which in detail is not uplifting, yet is also life affirming at a core level. That the beauty of humanity can survive what it is put through so often has always held cosmic meaning for me. The tiniest bit of hope carries the weight of the world when things are darkest. If I could internalize this as I know I should, I think I could completely reorient how I see the world. I can't spend too much time getting as close to all of that as this book does (I can't handle it yet), but I feel obligated to not let it get too far away all the same. At some level, it really is all that matters. Should what I am saying seem like ponderous bullshit, read the book.

William Walsh - Without Wax: A Documentary Novel: Kinda ok. The revelatory powers of pop culture, and smut's role within pop culture, can be very easily over-stated. In fact, it was over-stated upon its definition. That doesn't mean this book doesn't have its moments, but I didn't need to read this. It was good enough to finish, and not much more.

Paul Drummond - Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators: I love some of Roky Erickson's music, and find the 13th Floor Elevator story interesting. I am fascinated at how brutal society could be with young people, artists, creative people, recreational drug users (LSD was legal in Texas for a good chunk of the time the band was together), and progressive ideas. Texas is often the poster boy for being backward and stifling, but I suspect that image is somewhat overstated. Texas has produced many many characters, outsiders, and fringe thinkers that there has to be some level at which the odd are tolerated. Yeah, Roky and the band were harassed by the police, and much to much time was spent trying to catch them, but at the same time, the band was around for years. They made it on to TV and radio, let alone long stints at venues in Texas town after Texas town. There aren't a ton of documents on the life of this band and Roky Erickson, so I can't compare this to anything. I enjoyed being able to have the narrative of the band's life laid out in a way that allowed me to piece it together, but I feel like I am missing the essence of the story. Their music still sounds inspired and fresh. It had to have hit like the atom bomb. There had to be moments of rapture in and out of the band. I feel like much of that isn't in the book. Roky got a bad deal, but I think he has been dealt as much grief from those closest to him as he ever was from the state of Texas (Roky did pretty much live One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest over a small amount of pot he was "caught" with in Texas.) There is more to the story of what happened than I knew before, and more than I know now. I am not sure I need to go back for too much more. The music is enough.

Henry Miller - Letters to Emil: I like Henry Miller's non-fiction. It makes me feel as if the stuff that bugs me in the nation I live in are actually not unique to my time, but rather a part of a much longer struggle to take the tired, poor, huddled masses out of not only economic poverty, but cultural and aesthetic poverty. It is right that we start with the economics, but inexcusable that we stop there. He couldn't handle being around the willful ignorance of his time, and to hear him tell it, I am convinced that things now are different only by a few shades. I am not as interested in his fiction or his hedonism. The fiction I am getting better at understanding, the hedonism is not on my to-do list. One need not focus on the details of his exploits to understand his bigger point, and on those points he is mostly correct. The Culture War of today is a counter-revolution by those who lack skills needed for self-reflection and acceptance. The last 8 years have been ugly, but the savages were never going to succeed in re-taking the country. However, those who appreciate the loosening of cultural rigidity brought on by writers like Miller and those who came after do fail at one very important aspect of Cultural Warfare...when you win a battle, you need to follow the vanquished enemy and destroy their army. We need to do this, and to do this means we need to have a massive re-flowering of cultural freedom and expression. The internet is exactly what is needed to consolidate the victory, take some new ground, and reduce the capacity of the other side to continue fighting. Without Miller, I would not have seen the full scope of these things, and just how sadistic one has to be to want to return our cultural mores back to "how it used to be". This collection of letters back to the US from Henry Miller - in his late 30s - in Paris are instructive in seeing how he came to be who he famously became. He got his first taste of freedom, and his hedonism of the time would be considered wild even now. He learned quite a bit from his liberation, and the best (if most literal) account of it is here. This, taken with The Air Conditioned Nightmare and Stand Still Like The Hummingbird all are now a part of my collection of go-to writing when I need to relight the pilot light of my soul. I may not choose to live as he did, but I want the freedom to do what I want to do. That freedom doesn't come to those who wait for it to just happen to them. It is work, and this book (especially in context of the other 2) is clear instruction on how to go and get it.

Candace Kruttschnitt - Marking Time in the Golden State Women's Prisons: California's prison system is more dysfunctional than just about any institution in our country. It is a true industrial complex designed solely to degrade and punish. What is sad is that it wasn't always this way. I hope to live long enough to see compassion and rehabilitation re-enter our corrections systems again as I firmly believe that mass warehousing and vindictive management of offenders doesn't scale well. There are some who society simply needs to lock up and throw away the key (until the offender decides they wish to try to participate positively in society.) Most in jail over low-level drug busts, or crimes committed before the age of majority are people who I think could be reoriented towards productive lives if it were a priority. This book fascinated me because so little it written about the distinctions in practice and impact of incarceration for women. In the end, the book makes a case that Cali has given up on making that distinction and wishes to treat all who are paying their debt as hardened convicts needing punishment exclusively. I find it sick that people can now be put in near total isolation for years at a time. I don't know how people like that can ever be brought back into society without feeling hatred towards the society that allows this. I have no doubt we are going to find out. Many of the people doing 25 to life will get out in the next couple decades. Maybe they will be too old to act out, and that will be good enough for most people. I see it as lost potential and a missed chance for society. On a related note, for all you kooky practitioners of Reagan worship, this book documents a version of events I hadn't heard before, but is one I see as highly relevant and demonstrative of why the bitterness of the right solves nothing. The authors make a convincing case that Reagan was the first politician in California, if not anywhere on that scale within the US, to run for office as a "tough on crime" candidate. As we all know, no politician can ever be TOO TOUGH on crime! I hadn't realized what a pioneer Reagan was in this. What is less known is that the success of this appeal in the election was behind the end of rehabilitation in the California penal system, and was the beginning of the California Gang-Zoo Jail & School For The Criminal Arts system we have now. So many of the street gangs plaguing America have their origins in California prisons, and those gangs started after Reagan began his law-n-order crackdown & the resulting deluge of human punitive warehousing. The dysfunction visited upon the entirety of the USA by criminals trained by/for life in California prisons is beyond imagination. California prison gangs created the entire culture which dominates prisons throughout the country, and now that many of those gangs operate outside the prison as well, the real fruit planted by Reagan is starting to be harvested. The key thing to keep in mind, and the connection I hadn't seen before reading it in this book, is that when Ronnie was getting up and acting like a big tough guy over re-establishing law and order, the real object of his ire were the hippy kids doing sit-ins and smoking pot. Never forget that the pathological hatred of the cultural revolution of the 1960s is an obsession which has consumed the right in this country for some 40 years now. The real lever used by Reagan to start filling up the prisons was one of one-dimensional hatred of left-wing protest. The end result - the California prison system of today - has been the source of more dysfunction and misery in the society at large than ANYTHING Bill Ayers could have ever accomplished. Criminals belong in jail, and law enforcement's job is to catch criminals. That is as it should be. What is always revealing is to look at how the executive atop the enforcement apparatus decides to use their discretion and where they focus their energies. No one would ever suggest that all laws are equally enforced, and most of us believe that leeway is a net positive. However, what motivated Gov. Reagan, and the Archie Bunker Army who loved him, was a hatred of political dissent, disobedience, and protest undertaken by his ideological opponents. The real catalyst - the thing that just couldn't be tolerated - was the loudmouth hippies! With that going on, what could be the answer other than zero tolerance? The disobedient left is what motivated him to pull out the stops and make law enforcement the cornerstone of his self-definition as governor. Violent crime is a problem, and I am not suggesting that he wasn't also talking about that in some measure; but I think the case can fairly easily be made that the impetus behind this becoming an area of focus is not a dispassionate affinity for law and order. Rather, it is a forehead-vein popping anger at the thought that these punk kids think they aren't going to get their mind right and get out of the way of the REAL Americans! It is the same frothy mix of authority worship, love of conformity, binary morality, and wild hatred of liberalism. That he got his way, and used his energies, discretion, and initiative to create the prison industrial complex that we are stuck with now is a story that seems to have largely gone untold, yet I think it would be a perfect subject for a book of his own. That he rode the same thinking to the top office in the land, and in doing so created a cult of personality which still moistens glassy eyes to this day is encouraging only in that it means it is a topic that still may rate worthy of examination. It is the thinking behind this original California dynamic, and the fact that such thinking has become an Ideal For Living for the rump GOP, that makes it all something that still presents an element of danger. Think of it this way: many police agencies have decided to stop engaging in high-speed chases with fleeing suspects. They do this not because they are soft on crime, or don't care if the criminal is caught. They do this because in order to enforce the law in that way, the risk to society at large is too great. It is (correctly I think) seen as better to lower the overall risk to society by using other means to apprehend the criminal. It isn't a matter of needing new laws, or even of discretion; it is a simple weighing of cost/benefit to the actual methods used. The high speed chase is seen as being likely to create more destruction itself than having the criminal on the loose could do. There is a great wisdom in this that has larger application I believe. If being tough on crime, and sending huge numbers of people to prison without any serious attempt at rehabilitation-centric classification, then you are going to create huge numbers of people in a criminal class who will ultimately present more danger to society than they might have been if dealt with differently on the street. The way in which laws are prioritized for enforcement, and the nature of the punishment, have gone a long way in creating a criminal underclass who aren't being rehabilitated - actually, they are being made worse by prison - and who aren't given any practical shot at success once they were out. No question, California is the biggest case study in this dynamic; moreover, it is a dynamic pioneered here. That its origins are with Ronald Reagan, and that the original motive was political antipathy towards those who did not conform, smoked pot, protested against the war, and sought to change the social constrictions put upon them by society makes so much sense. If I thought I could do it well, I would write such a book myself. I don't think I can. Someone could, even if only to see whether the thesis is supported by fact or not. I suspect it is, but until it becomes someone's focus, one can only guess. In my case, an educated guess that social conservatism's zero tolerance lifestyle creates dysfunction where applied would generally be a safe one. In specific, I think it is a good bet in the case of the California prison explosion. For a book that was mostly academic, there was a ton of original thinking in here, and it makes a morbid unpleasant topic an object of inspiration.